Flexographic plate preparation process is relatively expensive compared to other types of plate preparation such as those used in offset printing. At the end of the plate preparation process a flexographic print job 200 as is shown in FIG. 2 is ready for imaging on a flexographic plate. The flexographic print job contains screened data 204 (data which is ready for exposure), the print job is typically presented by a one bit tagged image file format (TIFF) and contains at least one step and repeat element. The step and repeat element is repeated on the surface of the print job according to a specific geometry required for accomplishing the print job. The print job, when created, is adjusted to a specific plate imaging device, to conform to the imaging size characteristics of a specific imaging device.
There are circumstances when a ready to expose version of the job (or digital plate) is present without the geometrical information of the step and repeat element positioning on the plate, and a rerun of the job is required on an imaging device with different characteristics than the device for which the job had been originally prepared. The current practice is for an expert to manually inspect the printing job. The expert will identify the step and repeat element 208 on the printing job 200 and measure its bounding box. In addition, he will measure the geometrical repeat scheme used in the original job. Those measurements will be used to recreate the imposition scheme of the printing job.
There are also circumstances when a change needs to be applied to each one of the step and repeat elements, for example removing part of the screened data or adding data to each element. Current practice would be to apply the edit to each one of the elements separately, which would be time consuming.